HIV Positive, Pregnant Women Discovered after Screening - Mass Wedding In Kano

Kano — Ahead of the third round of the Kano mass wedding, the Hisbah Board in the state yesterday started screening couples.
Our correspondent, who visited the venue of the exercise, gathered that about eight persons among the prospective couples have so far tested positive to HIV, while some women who came to seek spouses were found to be pregnant.
On why they applied for the marriage despite their conditions, a woman who gave her name simply as Umma said that she was not aware that she was still pregnant as she had earlier gone for an abortion.
“I was shocked when I tested positive because I thought I had aborted the pregnancy. It is an act of God,” She said.The Assistant Commandant General, Women wing of Hisbah, Zahra’u Muhammd told Daily Trust that anyone who is found to be HIV positive or pregnant would not be a beneficiary of this mass wedding programme.
“We cannot go ahead with marriage arrangement for HIV carriers, we are not advocating for spread of the virus. What we normally do in this case is to advise the woman or the man to wait patiently until we get partners for them who are HIV carriers too. During the second batch of the mass wedding, we married off a man and woman who are HIV carriers and they are now blessed with a child,” she said.She added that the board will replace the HIV carriers and pregnant women with stand by applicants.
“You know we have more than 1,000 women who applied for the marriage, so we will replace those HIV carriers and pregnant women with those stand by women who are ready to get married at anytime. We will marry off 1000 women on Sunday insha Allah,” she said.